Inside the belly of the beast with Daniel Nodder
Performers Sean Burnett Dugdale-Martin, Salomé Neely, Janina Smolira, Aroha Morrison, Dan Nodder, and Gabby Clark centrestage at The Hannah, covered in goop.
There is a moment in Only Bones – Daniel Nodder where Dan disappears beneath a white t-shirt and starts rearranging limbs.
Two hands become a mouth. An elbow emerges where you don’t expect it to. The body stops behaving like a fixed, expected thing and starts becoming something stranger, funnier, more elastic. For Dan, that section of their award-winning solo show became the seed of a much bigger idea.
“A lot of my friends who are trans and non-binary told me they really resonated with that bit,” Dan says. “It was like being able to rearrange the body, taking bits off and assembling a new version.”
That image — of the body as something that could be pulled apart, rebuilt, reimagined — has grown into the idea behind Organizm, a new physical theatre work currently in development at The Hannah. Created with an all-Wellingtonian, majority trans and gender queer cast and crew, Organizm takes the seed that grew in Only Bones and expands it into something bigger, fleshier, and gloriously less containable.
From one square metre to a living organism
Only Bones – originally created by renowned circus and physical performer Thom Monckton – was built on a set of almost impossible restrictions: one performer, one light, no words, no set, no props, no narrative, and only one square metre of performance space. It has seen many iterations.
“It’s so restrictive that you have to be so creative,” Dan says.
Within those limits, Dan creates an entire universe using only their “jelly-like body” — a nonverbal cosmos of creatures, sounds, absurdities and microscopic transformations. The show has toured widely, won armfuls of awards, been refined and re-refined, and now returns to The Hannah for one night only, with all proceeds supporting Dan’s upcoming 25-show season at the prestigious Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August.
For Dan, the show is “90% planned and 10% improv”, with just enough room for the audience to change the temperature of the room.
“If I’m doing a bit and someone laughs really hard at something, I’ll stop and I’ll try to make them laugh more,” they say. “But if no one laughs, I just move past it.”
That responsiveness, that elastic relationship with the audience, has become part of Dan’s physical language. But Organizm asks what happens when that elasticity is no longer held inside one body.
“What if we had the idea of the white t-shirt expanded out into a big undulating mass,” Dan says, “and you don’t know how many actual bodies are under there?”
A body with many bodies
In Organizm, six performers become one creature: an ensemble-body rearranging itself into different forms, exploring what feels right.
Dan describes the work as a kind of “vibe successor” to Only Bones. It is still nonverbal, still physical, still full of sound and strange images, but its scale has shifted dramatically. Instead of one performer in one square metre, Organizm imagines the whole venue as a body.
The development process has already involved metres and metres of fabric, body soundscapes, experiments with live noise, and plenty of sentences that Dan admits sound ridiculous out of context.
“When the uterus sack slides off us,” they laugh, “do we leave the uterus behind or do we take it with us? Do we use it as a skipping rope now?”
It is slightly absurd, yes. But it is also deeply considered.
Dan and the team are exploring what bodies can do when they stop being asked to make sense in conventional ways. They are building small optical illusions out of limbs, heads, fabric and sound. At one point, they discovered a configuration involving a bridge position, a pair of legs, and a head perched somewhere unexpected.
“We’re calling this Mr Legs,” Dan says.
Joyful, weird and slimy
If all of this sounds like body horror, that’s because it sort of is. But Dan is quick to clarify the tone.
“We want it to be joyful, but it’s weird and slimy,” they say. “It’s like body horror played for laughs.”
That balance — the grotesque and the lovable, the strange and the funny, the monstrous and the tender — sits at the heart of Organizm.
Dan talks about “the beauty of unbeauty”, and the possibility that being our own gross and beautiful beings might just be the best thing we can be. Underneath the fabric, the flesh, the sound and the slapstick, Organizm is interested in what happens when bodies reject the rules they have been given.
“A lot of the show is rejecting the binary, rejecting gender, and applying it to an analogy of rejecting humanity,” Dan says. “Becoming just more animal, more flesh, more primordial versions of ourselves.”
For trans, queer and non-binary audiences, that idea carries a particular charge. Organizm is not simply about transformation as spectacle. It is about the lived experience of presentation, dysphoria, play, possibility, and the desire to define yourself beyond the narrow categories the world offers.
“We are all just flesh,” Dan says. “Why would we not define ourselves as something transcendent and beautiful and in the stars? Why chain ourselves up when there’s a choice?”
At the same time, Dan resists the idea that audiences need to decode the work in any one way.
“If someone just likes the show because it’s got cool movement, that is not a misunderstanding of the show. That is a valid interpretation of the work.”
In other words: you can come for the queer post-human body politics, or you can come because people flapping around inside a giant meat-world sounds like an excellent night out. Both are correct.
Making a mess at The Hannah
For this stage of development, The Hannah is not just a venue. It is part of the organism.
Dan describes the development model as something artists are “really missing” — the chance to live inside a space, spread out, make a mess, test ideas, and discover what the building itself wants to offer.
“It’s so valuable for artists to be able to do what we’ve done upstairs and just have all our shit everywhere and let the creative process be messy and insane,” they say.
For Organizm, that is so important. A work like this cannot be fully imagined in a taped-out rehearsal room. It needs corners, trapdoors, balconies, shadows, fabric, trial and error. It needs time. It needs space to crawl and breathe.
“Making the work in the place where you will be performing it is such a dream and such a gift,” Dan says. “You can actually visualise everything that’s going to be in the space and how it’s all going to work with an audience.”
That kind of development, Dan says, makes better and more interesting work. It allows artists to go deeper, to slow down, to learn through play and failure rather than rushing toward opening night.
“I think doing things slowly is how you learn well,” Dan says.
Following this development, Organizm will continue to percolate. Dan is moving their practice to Melbourne, but plans to return to premiere the work at The Hannah in late 2027.
“It feels very special to have it in The Hannah,” they say. “We’re living in here for a week and turning the whole space into a body, so it feels very at home to be doing it.”
Before then, audiences have the chance to see where the idea began.
In late June, Only Bones – Daniel Nodder returned for one night only: a tiny, intriguing, elastic universe made from almost nothing. And somewhere inside it, if you look closely, you will see the first little amoeba of Organizm beginning to wriggle.
Daniel Nodder (they/he) is a Wellington-born physical theatre performer, clown and maker whose work brings together dance, absurdity, sound and a wonderfully elastic approach to the human body. Their new ensemble work, Organizm — created with a majority trans and gender-queer cast and crew — is currently in development at The Hannah and is set to premiere here in late 2027.